Scarcity: how the things we lack dominate the way we are
What do you crave? Beyond the usual: food, a drink, a break, a holiday, not to work anymore, and spend your days posting pictures on Instagram from exotic locations with the caption “today’s office 🤷”.
What I mean by that is, what is the thing you always seem to think about but never seem to acquire? It could be money, health, happiness, or relationships. It could be safety, security, the ability to know you can pay your rent or bills for the next month.
These cravings, these gaps in what we feel we need get overlooked often when we talk about mental health. Because these cravings can be purely material, economic or social in nature, they don’t get the same attention that our inner feelings do. But in this week’s Brink, I’m going to be spending time talking about how our experience of scarcity can have a profound impact on who we think we are.
Scarcely thinking 🤯
When you are scarce on time, on food, on attention, or anything that creates a state of feeling deprived, it becomes something we fixate on. It’s like when you’re hungry, you start thinking about food. Over time, it becomes all you think about.
Not only does it start to dominate your thinking, it starts to crowd out our ability to do other things that we’d seemingly have little difficulty doing when we’re feeling fine. That’s scarcity. It’s been studied a lot when it comes to the effects of poverty, especially on children.
When children don’t have enough food, or security or stability, their mental capacity is strangled by the thing they lack. At school, these children can’t concentrate and are often labeled as unruly and punished. But the reality is their capacity to perform cognitive tasks is hampered by what they lack.
In studies, they found scarcity had profound impacts on IQ, by as much as 14 points in some cases. That amount can move you from the category of “average” IQ to “superior” intelligence. Or, if you move in the other direction, losing thirteen points can take you from “average” to “borderline deficient.”
Matt Hussey
But the same applies to adults too. Chronically busy people, suffering from a scarcity of time, also demonstrate impaired abilities and make self-defeating choices, such as unproductive multi-tasking or neglecting family for work.
Lonely people, suffering from a scarcity of social contact, become hyper-focused on their loneliness, prompting behaviors that render it worse, like self-isolating and avoiding social occasions. People that struggle with food, too, also find they make decisions that compound, rather than alleviate the challenges they face.
"Scarcity captures the mind," behavioral scientist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir in their 2013 book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.
It promotes tunnel vision, helping us focus on the crisis at hand but making us "less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled". Wise long-term decisions and willpower require cognitive resources. Scarcity leaves far less of those resources at our disposal.
Matt Hussey
I see this with clients a lot. When they are chronically lacking in something, they often overlook or ignore opportunities to improve.
Now, it’s important to understand that not all scarcity is bad. When we’re up against it, from a time or resources perspective, people can deliver extraordinary things. Think of leaving a task to the last moment, or having to do things under pressure. Sometimes this brings out the best of us. Lonely people, for example, can read facial expressions more accurately.
Psychological scarcity is a more pernicious idea. It’s almost chronic in nature, and we become accustomed to the idea of that thing never being satisfied.
The Blame Game 🙋
Because scarcity is a reaction to the world around us, it often gets talked about in politics and sociology.
In the UK for example, there has been typically a tough stance taken on people who can’t focus on their future selves because of feelings of scarcity. The argument goes that people need to be able and willing to make decisions and plans that benefit them over the long term.
You see it in workplaces too. Employees are told by their managers they are working too hard, they should take more time off, and they should not be so stressed all the time. When they don’t change, it’s because they are too lazy, too stupid, or too unwilling to make simple and easy decisions, according to those judging those in scarcity.
Matt Hussey
But the reality is, when you’re overwhelmed and unable to shove those feelings out of the way, there is very little else you can think about. Missed deadlines are a lot like overdue bills. Double-booked meetings (committing time you do not have) are a lot like bounced checks (spending money you do not have). The busier you are, the greater the need to say no.
The more indebted you are, the greater the need to not buy. Plans to escape sound reasonable but prove hard to implement. They require constant vigilance—about what to buy or what to agree to do. When vigilance flags—the slightest temptation in time or in money—you sink deeper. What’s going on? Well, it’s all to do with how our heads prioritize needs.
Fight, Flight, or Fret 😟
In times of scarcity, our heads essentially limit our ability to do all the uniquely human things we do all the time. Things like processing information, making reasonable decisions, and projecting ourselves into the future. It also turns down our ability to control impulses.
These things we reach for, which most of the time we can keep in check, are let out of their psychological boxes and allowed to run riot across the scorched battlefield that is our scarce brains. This is the place where things like addiction, eating disorders, and mild-to-moderate self-harm - pulling out hair, picking skin etc., start to come into play.
In ye olde psychology books, there was an assumption that when we were faced with threats or acute stress, we would choose between fight or flight. But more recently we’ve come to understand that there is a big fat middle ground between those two poles: freeze. It’s the idea that we don’t immediately spring into action, but instead, stay right where we are.
In times of scarcity, we often freeze, or fret about the thing we don’t have, and seem unable to know what to do about it. The important thing to understand is this is a normal response to something we believe is a genuine threat. People rich and poor, old and young all display remarkably similar responses to scarcity: a shutting down of most of our normal functions and an over-focus on the thing we lack.
Matt Hussey
The good news is, if we can understand what’s going on for us, it can help address the thing we deprived of. Now, again, because of the nature of scarcity touching lots of different parts of our lives, there is no quick fix for the problem of scarcity. It can be caused by poverty, or by a lack of stability, or a history dotted with times when we felt unsafe. Scarcity is complicated.
But the path out of scarcity is being able to identify what it is we lack and be able to call it what it is. Most of us will experience some version of this at some point in our lives. The key is to not meet it with anger or frustration but with empathy and kindness.
The same goes for if we see it in others. While the solution to their problem might seem simple, there may be something far more pressing at play that is robbing them of the ability to help themselves.
Things we learned this week 🤓
- 🌲 Living near green spaces can help relieve symptoms of anxiety and depression.
- 🎺 When it comes to music, our tastes form and stay fixed by the time we reach 16.
- 🧏♂️ When we’re ill we’re more likely to see stress as more threatening.
- 🤕 It’s official: there is a gap in teenagers between when all our emotions come online and our ability to manage them.
If you would be so kind 🙏
Do something nice for someone. If that person is me, then the nicest most nicely thing would be to share this with a friend if it resonates. But doing nice things for others is great too.
I love you all. 💋